Object of the month: a Whitby gansey, and the myth that will not sink

This month's object is the navy gansey in the costume case: a fisherman's jumper knitted in Whitby around 1900, donated by the family who kept it wrapped in tissue for three generations. It looks unremarkable until you get close, and then it looks like engineering.

Seaman's iron

A gansey is knitted in the round — no seams to let the wind in — from a tightly spun five-ply worsted the trade called "seaman's iron". Knitted at a tension modern knitters flinch at, it turned wind and spray nearly as well as oilskin while leaving the arms free for hauling. The details are all working details: a diamond gusset under each arm for movement, a high round neck, sleeves ending short of the wrist so the cuff never trailed in the water, and initials often knitted into the welt. Patterns — cables, ladders, herringbone, "print o' the wave" — were carried in families and rarely written down until collectors like Gladys Thompson recorded the Whitby patterns in the 1950s.

The myth

Every guide gets the question: is it true a drowned fisherman could be identified by his gansey pattern, each port having its own? We answer it honestly, because this is an archive, not a gift shop. The story is repeated up and down this coast, and there are recorded cases of bodies being recognised by their clothing — including knitted initials. But the strict version, a pattern-per-port dictionary you could read a stranger's home from, doesn't survive contact with the evidence. Patterns travelled with marriages, moved with the herring fleet, and were swapped and admired between the Scots fisher lassies and local knitters on the quayside. Whitby knitters knitted "Filey" motifs and vice versa.

What's true is in some ways better: a gansey was months of a specific woman's evenings, knitted for a specific man, with her own hand visible in every choice. Several of our oral history interviewees describe watching their mothers knit them. One, recorded in 2014, put it best: "You could tell it was his, because she made it. Nobody needed a pattern book for that."

The gansey is on display in the museum's back room, beside the herring photographs. Bring a knitter; they'll be there a while.